Wednesday, August 15, 2012

According to No Wave journalist Roy Trakin, who wrote for Soho Weekly
News and New York Rocker, “a very important hidden figure, who nurtured
the scene and almost singlehandedly championed No Wave back at a time no
one else got it, was Charles Ball of Lust/Unlust. He was like an Alan
Lomax in the swamps, documenting the scene with field recordings.” Ball
had worked alongside Terry Ork at Ork Records, the pioneering New York
independent label that put out Television’s first single. Trakin
describes Ball as “a real heavy thinker, into French polemical film
makers, a real Godard freak”.

Speaking from his home in Florida in (I think) 2003, Charles Ball told me: “I’d spent a year
translating Jacques Revet’s film criticism. I was big into French New
Wave. I read a lot of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse. Also the Situationists.
And Lacan. Coming from a film and structuralist perspective, I was very
familiar with Roland Barthes and all that kind of thing.”

The name
Lust/Unlust came from this sort of reading.
Ball had left to start his own production company, which is really what
Lust/Unlust was, more than a label as such. Ultimately he let the
artists choose the names for their labels so it looked like he had a
whole stable of different record labels to his credit. The first
Lust/Unlust release was a Teenage Jesus & the Jerks single; Lunch
called her sub-label Migraine. Ball appears to have been a gifted
producer, like Martin Hannett, exploring the potential of the first
generation of digital reverbs.

Charles Ball: “It allowed you to do
things that you could do before like flanging but go much further with
it--you could actually designate a room where the reflections would
suddenly become being harmonized--a pitch up above what the original
was. When I tried to do a mix I tried to make sure something was
changing throughout.” On one Mars EP, he used binaural recording, mixed
to simulate the spacing of your ears. “I also added on digital delays
and reverbs so there was both the exposed physical space if you were to
listen on headphones which sounds uncanily like someone’s behind you or
placed somewhere in space, and then all these artificial space and
unreal space added by the digital delay. Some of the guitar solos I have
on that record are just really extraordinary, it would start like it
seemed like you were seeing the amplifier and then suddenly you were in
some kind of room or chamber that’s psychological.”

Some of Lust/Unlust releases:

Ball also told me he was sitting on an archive of No Wave field recordings, live performances he'd taped.